Fire vs. Plus

The Kindle Fire is on the left. Note the square shape compared to the Tab Plus' rounded edges, which is typical of Samsung tablets today.

Amazon started shipping its Kindle Fire tablet Nov. 15, and now reviewers are able to compare the evolution of the Kindle e-reader product line to other tablets on the market. That's exactly what is happening here, as eWEEK evaluated the 7-inch, custom Google Android-based Kindle Fire head-to-head with Samsung's Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus Android 3.2 Honeycomb tablet. The Plus, whose display is a crisper WSVGA (1024 x 600) Plane-to-Line Switching (PLS) LCD compared to the Fire's IPS (In-plane Switching) screen, weighs 12.2 ounces compared to 14.6 ounces for the Fire. The Plus also employs a speedy 1.2GHz processor versus the Fire's 1GHz dual-core chip, and has 16GB of internal storage compared to just 8GB for the Fire. The Plus beats the fire in many ways, but that's understandable given that the Plus costs twice as much. A premium tablet, the WiFi-only Plus costs $399 compared to $199 for the Fire, which is only available in WiFi. One major factor both tablets have in common is that they're geared toward multimedia consumption. Fire comes off as a shopping and multimedia consumption vehicle for Amazon's Web services, whereas the Plus is a typical Android slate, pointing consumers to Google's Web services.